My biggest issue with it is that there seems to be no easy way to provide more space to the VM docker runs inside. While it seems trivial it can be useful if you happen to have really large images (yes, for valid reasons). If you run too many containers you just run out of space.
I ran into this too when fooling around with SyntaxNet. It hink the default size of the VM is 16GB. I kept running out of swap space even after bumping the ram on the VM up to 16GB.
Isn't it just as much about deployment though? The thing about docker is that deploying your new app basically means stopping your running instance and starting a new one. You actually don't even NEED to stop the current running one if you have something above it that just knows which instances / ports to route traffic to.
I think docker is about ease of deployment. You still use the same server you just run a different command. As opposed to creating a new image and spinning up said image.
You can imagine roll back / migration is pretty easy in this case.
Docker has been huge for us. We can run the same containers locally that we run in production. Dockerfiles are SIMPLE and easy for people to create and understand.
Fig has really made using docker for local dev rather pleasant.
Are there some hiccups here and there? Yes. The project is young and they are actively trying to smooth over a lot of issues and pain points.
I feel like most people who dislike docker have not actually tried it or used it. That could just be a wrong opinion though.
We use consul. Each instance has it's own bind setup with DNS forwarding and it forwards normal traffic on through the regular DNS servers and anything in .consul on to the consul client running locally.
Both AWS free and GCE require a credit card before doing anything at all, so that's not a barrier.
As for the actual price... GCE's cost of .013c / hour is so tiny that I don't see how you can say it's a "huge deal".
You can spin up a GCE for 5 hours a day for a week to experiment and it'll cost you less than 50 cents. It's not quite free, but it basically is. As long as you're just playing around, always-on shouldn't matter so you can spin the server up to play, down when you're done, and thus pay almost nothing.
I recently moved from Long Island to Boston. Would love to get coffee with you sometime when I am down there visiting family. I moved as the commute from LI to NYC was brutal and I felt there were better job opportunities in Boston. I'd love to pick your brain sometime about the status of the island and NYC.
https://gpgtools.org/